Statistics show that in many countries the fleet of cycles and bicycles owned by individual persons are relevant figures. To give some examples, in Italy and France the number of cycles and bicycles that are property of individual citizens amounts to more than 20 million in each country, meaning that there is one cycle or bicycle per 3.5 persons. Similar situations can be found, with some variations, in other countries such as Spain, United Kingdom and Germany. In the Netherlands, there is more than one cycle or bicycle per person.
According to the United States Census Bureau, there are over 8,000,000 people who call New York City their home. Of these 8,000,000 people, approximately one half of one percent utilize bicycles as a means of commuting around the city on a regular basis. This percentage is even lower if one counted the numerous commuters and tourists who travel into New York City from the surrounding suburbs and elsewhere to work and play. Based on these figures, the New York City bicycle commuter market has a vast number of bicyclists. There is an increasingly growing wave of New York City's pro-bicyclist policies, including the enactment of recent laws compelling New York City parking garages, commercial buildings and certain residential buildings to designate spaces exclusively for bicycle parking and the installment of miles of newly created bicycle lanes throughout New York City. This immense fleet of privately-owned cycles and bicycles cannot be ignored when an automatic parking station is built for cycles and bicycles.
Automatic parking stations for cycles and bicycles installed in diverse sites within a city and connected via a centralized information system are generally known. For instance, U.S. Patent Application Publication Nos. 2007/0220933 (Gagosz) and US 2007/0239465 (Le Gars) disclose apparatuses for automatically renting bicycles. U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2010/0245128 (Kanof) discloses an apparatus with unique identification tags for each bicycle that use its parking system.
The above prior art apparatuses suffer from some drawbacks, among which the most relevant one includes the fact that they are either closed systems, which are not suitable to serve a plurality of different users and operators, or provide little or no protection to the bicycle parked at the station.